Lamartine was born on October 21, 1790 in Macon, France. After brief military service under Louis XVIII, he turned to literature, writing verse tragedies and elegies.
From 1830 he was active in politics, speaking for the working classes. After France’s Second Republic was proclaimed in 1848, he briefly headed the provisional government until the revolution was crushed.In later years he published novels, poetry, and historical works in a vain struggle against bankruptcy.
As a writer, Lamartine is known chiefly for his poetry, which has the romantic characteristics of conventional sentiment expressed with lyric grace and refinement, an atmosphere of gentle melancholy, and particularly effective descriptions of rural scenery. His most popular and influential volume of poems is Méditations poétiques (Poetic Meditations, 1820); other volumes are Nouvellesm éditations poétiques (New Poetic Meditations, 1823), Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (Poetic and Religious Harmonies, 1830), Jocelyn (1836), La chute d’un ange (An Angel’s Fall, 1838), and Recueillements (Reflections, 1839). Lamartine was also a prolific writer of fiction and of biographical, critical, and historical works. His prose works include Histoire de Girondins (1847) and the autobiographical novels Raphaël (1849) and Graziella (1852; trans. 1876). Lamartine died February 28, 1869, at 79 in Paris.